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A blog by Bill Hess

Running Dog Publications

P.O. Box 872383 Wasilla, Alaska 99687

 

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Wasilla

Wasilla is the place where I have lived for the past 29 years - sort of. The house in which my wife and I raised our family sits here, but I have made my rather odd career as a different sort of photojournalist by continually wandering off to other places to photograph people and gather information, which I have then put together in various publications that have served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities.

Although I did not have a great of free time to devote to this rather strange community, named after a Tanaina Athabascan Indian chief who knew Wasilla in the way that I so impossibly long to, I have still documented it regularly over the past quarter-century plus. In the early days, my Wasilla photographs focused mostly upon my children and the events they participated in - baseball, football, figure skating, hockey, frog catching, fire cracker detonation, Fourth of July parade - that sort of thing. 

In 2002, I purchased my first digital camera and then, whenever I was home, I began to photograph Wasilla upon a daily basis, but not in a conventional way. These were grab shots - whatever caught my eye as I took my many long walks or drove through the town, shooting through the car window at people and scenes that appeared and disappeared before I could even focus and compose in the traditional photographic way.

Thus, the Wasilla portion of this blog will be devoted both to the images that I take as I wander about and those that I have taken in the past. Despite the odd, random, nature of the images, I believe they communicate something powerful about this town that I have never seen expressed anywhere else. 

Wasilla is a sprawling community that has been slapped down hodge-podge upon what was so recently wilderness of the most exquisite beauty. In its design, it is deliberately anti-zoned, anti-planned. In the building of Wasilla, the desire to make a buck has trumped aesthetics and all other considerations. This town, built in the midst of exquisite beauty, has largely become an unsightly, unattractive, mess of urban sprawl. Largely because of this, it often seems to me that Wasilla is a community with no sense of community, a town devoid of town soul.

Yet - Wasilla is my home and if I am lucky it will be until I grow old and die. Despite its horrific failings, it is still made of the stuff of any small city: people; moms and dads, grammas and grampas, teens, children, churches, bars, professionals, laborers, soldiers, missionaries, artists, athletes, geniuses, do-gooders, hoodlums, the wealthy, the homeless, the rational and logical, the slightly insane and the wholly insane - and, yes, as is now obvious to the whole world, politicians, too.

So perhaps, if one were to search hard enough, it might just be possible to find a sense of community here, and a town soul. So, using my skills as a photojournalist and a writer, I hope to do just that. If this place has a sense of community, I will find it. If there is a town soul to Wasilla, I will document it. I won't compete with the newspapers. Hell no! But as time and income allow, it will be fun to wander into the places where the folks described above gather, and then put what I find on this blog.

 

by 300...

Anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Wasilla. This encompasses perhaps the most wild, dramatic, gorgeous, beautiful section of land and sea to be found in any comparable space anywhere on Earth. I can never explore it all, but I will do the best that I can, and will here share what I find and experience with you.  

and then some...

Anywhere else in the world that I happen to get to, such as Point Lay, Alaska; Missoula, Montana; Serenki, Chukotka, Russia; or Bangalore, India. Perhaps even Lagos, Nigeria. I have both a desire and scheme to get me there. It is a long shot. We shall see if I succeed.

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Entries in Barrow Whalers football (11)

Sunday
Aug082010

Slide Show, ten images: the Barrow Whalers football at practice

DateSunday, August 8, 2010 at 2:02PM

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers football practice slide show

 

In my last post, I wrote that today I would post images from yesterday's Barrow Whalers football game, the season opener, but I have changed my mind. I did prepare a selection of images from that game to post, but I was lacking some fundamental information that I can only get by talking to a coach, maybe a player or two and it is Sunday and I do not want to bother anybody by tracking them down at their homes.

Plus, I am feeling kind of lazy myself and don't really want to do any tracking.

So, instead, for today, I am just going to run this 10 image slide show of the Whalers at practice the day before the game. Perhaps tomorrow I will post the game.

It had been my intent to include a photo essay in the Uiñiq magazine that I completed several months back but which, for a succession of odd reasons, took a tremendous amount of time to get printed, mailed and then delivered and so only recently reached most readers. 

Before I had the chance to shoot that essay, I took my bad fall, shattered my shoulder, went through my two surgeries, lost my right shoulder and got a titanium one. So, when the 2008 football season started up less than two months later, I was in no condition to stand on the sidelines and try to shoot football.

By the 2009 season, my shoulder was still quite fragile but I could handle my big cameras again and had been thinking about it, but then my wife broke her knee for the second time in 7 months and I found myself unable to do much of anything but to help care for her.

Football was out. 

I still feel a little badly about that, because last year was the whalers 4th season and the final year that any players from the original team, one that has become a bit of a legend, would be with the team.

This year, the Barrow Whalers football team is in what is commonly called a "rebuilding season" in the sport - this means that the older, experienced players that made the team into the legend that it has become have moved on to be replaced by a largely younger group with less experience.

Yet, I have discovered that there is enthusiasm and fire in these boys and so this year I have set out to finally do my Barrow Whalers football essay - too late to capture any of the first squad of players, but then they were widely documented nationally by ESPN and others and may well be the subject of a future movie, so perhaps there was not much that I could have added to their story, anyway.

While the majority population of Barrow remains Iñupiat and Barrow is definitely an Iñupiat town, it is also a cosmopolitan community with residents whose roots and origins reach around the world. So too, as Coach Mark Voss told me, is the composition of the team and coaching staff cosmopolitan - Iñupiat, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, White, African American, Filipino, Latino...

Should I pull this off as I hope, I think it will prove to be an interesting essay. While my take yesterday does do a functional job of covering the game, it is not what I would have hoped it would be. Yesterday, I learned that when it comes to photographing football, a game that I had not shot a single frame on since the fall of '92 when Caleb played his final year at Wasilla High, I am out of practice and need to sharpen my skills.

So I will attend more practice sessions this week to take many pictures. My only real purpose will be to hone my skills for future game times and to better get to know the players and coaching staff, so that hopefully I can produce the kind of essay that I envision.

To see the ten image slide show from the practice the day before the first came, click on the photo or on either of the links above and below this text.

 

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers practice slide show


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